the analyst have spoken.....
Here are some quotes on the subject of the rare earth pricing and valuation bubbles.
CONSTANTINE KARAYANNOPOULOS, CEO, NEO MATERIAL TECHNOLOGIES
"I'm afraid there is a bubble in that sector. It's absolutely incredible that companies that three months ago were worth a few million dollars in market capitalization today to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, just because China has further restricted the export quotas."
On why some companies are overvalued: "When I look around at all these junior mining companies that are proclaiming they will dig the ore out of the ground, then they will separate the individual elements and sell high-value, high-purity rare earths to the world, I have to roll my eyes, because we've been at it for 17 years, and we're still learning how to do it."
JON HYKAWY, ANALYST, BYRON CAPITAL MARKETS
"Everybody's standing up, waving the flag and shrieking it's rare earths because that pushes the valuation up, a good sign that we're in something of a bubble." "There comes a point where you've run out of all the arguments, and at that point you're into the Alan Greenspan 'irrational exuberance' range. We've reached that for some of these names. You can't expect rare earth prices to continue to rise forever. You can't afford to make the products out of the rare earths any more if they keep rising."
CHRISTOPHER ECCLESTONE, STRATEGIST, HALLGARTEN & CO
"There's a dot-com aspect to a few of these mines ... A good example of that is Molycorp, which is a company that really has virtually no income at this point, and yet is now topping a $2 billion market cap and it sort of has a post dot-com like look about it."